Gardener's Journal

Hello from Phoenix! While most of the country is enjoying a beautiful winter wonderland right now, those of us in Zone 9 are enjoying our extended gardening season. I wanted to share some photos from my garden, and a few products I’ve added to my raised garden beds from Gardener’s Supply Company

Leigh Omilinsky and I have been close friends for many years, our work and lives intersecting via Chicago’s restaurant industry where Leigh crafts beautiful (and delicious! ) I personally was excited about the idea for this project as it was finally a way to combine a residential garden with a restaurant kitchen garden, and given that Leigh lives in the historic Chicago neighborhood of Logan Square, we’d be creating and building a garden in a very typical (and often challenging! ) Each of our four standing planters was planted with 4 to 5 kinds of herbs and edible flowers for Nico’s pastry program, including rosemary, bachelor buttons, citrus gem marigold, oxalis, bay laurel, lemon verbena, Genovese basil, Mrs. Burns’ lemon basil, African blue basil, Red Rubin basil, Purple Ruffles basil (we’re growing a TON of basil! ), lemon thyme, nasturtium, flowering verbena and begonias. It is served with a plum-lemon verbena jam, olive oil honey, cardamom creme fraiche, fresh plums, and plum-lemon verbena sorbet, and it’s garnished with garden flowers, of course.

I feel lucky that I get to grow things as part of my job as testing coordinator. Last year, I was asked to grow a variety of plants in the Gardener’s Revolution® Classic Tomato Planter

You can integrate your chickens with a compost pile, let chickens act as a go-between when it comes to food waste and the garden, and help them along to create compost right inside the coop over winter. Allow the manure and bedding in the coop to accumulate and decompose inside the coop all winter, then in the spring you clean the whole thing out and have beautiful compost for your garden. Chicken poop tea adds nutrients, enzymes, microorganisms, and other good things to your garden soils as compost does, but the liquid form makes it convenient to give a drink of tea to new transplants or plants that need a bit of a boost. A note of caution: Fresh chicken manure is extremely high in nitrogen, which can burn young seedlings or plant roots, so you will definitely want to let the manure age for at least 3 months, and preferably 6 months or even a year, before using it on your garden.